Short Description:

Glittery School is a project for supporting children that struggle with reading and writing basic competencies to make progress and reduce the learning gap.

Every child in Romania should be able to write and read when they finish fourth grade. It shouldn't be a dream, but unfortunately, nearly 2 out of 3 children from vulnerable families end up at school as poor readers.

Help us change this and equip them with age-appropriate books and the schools they attend.

We took the first step four years ago with the Glittery School project. Since then, we have been offering them an online library, educational materials, and professional training for teachers. Now, just like last year, we want to take the next step and with you to fill the library shelves of 15 rural schools with books that will grow good readers!

Because without beautiful books we don't have good readers either.

And we will work with the 15 schools to organize summer schools to help 350 students in preparatory grade accelerate reading. Over ten days of Summer School, children will go through activities drawn around these books, carefully selected by our experts, suitable for beginner readers.

Details

The project is in its fourth year of development, with the intention of scaling specialized literacy interventions among disadvantaged communities

Scoala cu scLipici/Glittery School - Glittery Schools - a project to support children who have reading-writing difficulties to help them make progress and reach their grade level.

The Glittery School project aims to support Preparatory Grade and Grade 1 disadvantaged students in 100 schools all over Romania to develop their literacy skills to perform at grade level. We address children from communities with socio-economic and educational problems and schools that perform well below average on national assessments.

In order to provide real support to students, we address the needs of primary school teachers to develop their literacy teaching skills for children who come to school without the basic prerequisites - we respond to the need for evidence-based teacher training for teaching reading and writing, in areas such as teaching phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding as well as comprehension, the need for quality resources and educational materials for emergent and early literacy skills development in the primary grades. We provide teachers and students with the literacy kit "All children read – A Good Start in Perparatory Grade", an educational material developed and piloted by Noi Orizonturi Foundation in the 2021-2022 academic year, as support in the development of literacy skills. Students receive the printed version of the children’s books and worksheets from the literacy kit.

We will also address the relevant stakeholders in education and the general public so that they become aware of the need to develop children's emergent and early literacy skills, the need for quality (initial and continuous) teacher education.
The project is in its fourth year of development, with the intention of scaling specialized literacy interventions among disadvantaged communities.

In the summer of 2023, we support the running of 15 "Summer Schools with scLipici" for 350 children in the preparatory class in vulnerable communities in Romania. We invite schools through interested preparatory class teachers who have gained experience in the Schools with scLipici program this school year to apply in order to be supported to organize a 10-day summer camp. We are particularly targeting those children in the preparatory class who were assessed with the Emergent Literacy Assessment Tool both at the start of the program and at the end of the school year and who were found to need additional support to progress in reading and writing and during the holiday summer.

We prepare each team school to design, plan, organize, mobilize resources to run a summer school to accelerate the development of literacy skills in children left behind. The training sessions are led by one educational expert who provides the agenda and new contributions (strategies, implementation models, feedback on teachers' plans) and facilitates discussions. Each team is assisted in the preparation of summer schools. eg: mentoring for each summer school, signing award contracts, organizing participants, preparing the agenda, coordinating and training the extended local teams, etc. Winning teams benefit from a set of books and learning materials and a 85 lei/student budget to cover meals and/or transportation and/or supplies for children to the summer school.